CO2 turned into

stone in Iceland in
climate change
breakthrough

Made by :- kaniskha chugh

b.Tech (f.t)
 Carbon dioxide has been pumped
underground and turned rapidly into
stone, demonstrating a radical new way
to tackle climate change.
The unique project promises a cheaper
and more secure way of burying CO2
from fossil fuel burning underground,
where it cannot warm the planet. Such
carbon capture and storage(CCS) is
thought to be essential to halting global
warming, but existing projects store the
CO2 as a gas and concerns about costs
and potential leakage have halted some
plans.
 The new research pumped CO2 into the
volcanic rock underIcelandand sped up a
natural process where the basalts react with
the gas to form carbonate minerals, which
make up limestone. The researchers were
amazed by how fast all the gas turned into
a solid just two years, compared to the
hundreds or thousands of years that had
been predicted.
We need to deal with rising carbon
emissions and this is the ultimate
permanent storage turn them back to
stone, said Juerg Matter, at the University
of Southampton in the UK, who led the
researchpublished in the journal Science.
 The Iceland project has already been
increased in scale to bury 10,000 tonnes of
CO2 a year and the basalt rocks used are
common around the world, forming the floor
of all the oceans and parts of the land too.
In the future, we could think of using this for
power plants in places where theres a lot of
basalt and there are many such places, said
Martin Stute, at Columbia University in the
US and part of the research team.
Testing has taken place in the
Columbia River Basalts, extensive deposits in
Washington and Oregon in the US. India,
which has many polluting coal power plants,
has huge basalt deposits in theDeccan Traps.